With General John Campbell’s tour of duty in Afghanistan finished, a
new commander has taken over. Admittedly, things did not go well during
Campbell’s year and a half heading up the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) there, but that’s par for the course. In late 2015,
while he was in the saddle, the Taliban took
the provincial capital of Kunduz, the first city to be (briefly) theirs since
the American invasion of 2001. In response, U.S. forces devastated
a Doctors Without Borders hospital. The Taliban is also now in control
of more
territory than at any time since the invasion and gaining an ever-firmer
grip on contested Helmand Province in the heart of the country’s poppy-growing
region (and so the staggering drug funds that go with it). In that
same province, only about half of the “on duty” Afghan security
forces the United States trained, equipped, and largely funded (to the tune
of more than $65
billion over the years) were reportedly
even present.

On his way into retirement, General Campbell has been vigorously urging
the Obama administration to expand its operations in that country. (“I’m
not going to leave,” he said, “without making sure my leadership
understands that there are things we need to do.”) In this, he’s
been in good company. Behind the scenes, “top U.S. military commanders”
have reportedly been talking up a renewed, decades-long
commitment to Afghanistan and its security forces, what one general has termed
a “generational approach” to the war there.

And yes, as Campbell headed off stage, General John Nicholson, Jr., beginning
his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, has officially taken command of ISAF.
Though it wasn’t a major news item, he happens to be its 17th
commander in the 14-plus years of Washington’s Afghan War. If this
pattern holds, by 2030 that international force, dominated by the U.S., will
have had 34 commanders and have fought, by at least a multiple of two, the longest
war in our history. Talk about all-American records! (USA! USA!)

If such a scenario isn’t the essence of déjà vu
all over again, what is? Imagine, for a minute, each of those 17 ISAF
commanders (recently, but not always, Americans, including
still resonant names like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal as well as those
like Dan McNeill and David McKiernan already lost in the fog of time) arriving
at yearly intervals, each scrambling to catch-up, get the big picture, and run
the show. Imagine that process time after time, and you have the definition
of what, in kid culture, might be called a do-over – a chance to get something
right after doing it wrong the first time. Of course, yearly do-overs
are a hell of a way to run a war, but they’re a great mechanism for ensuring
that no one will need to take responsibility for a disaster of 14 years and
counting.

How to Play Do-Over

For journalists, when it comes to twenty-first-century American war, do-overs
are a boon. From collapsing
U.S.-trained, funded, and equipped local militaries to that revolving door for
commanders in Afghanistan to terror groups whose leaderships are eternally being
eviscerated
yet are never wiped out, do-overs ensure that your daily copy is essentially
pre-written for you. In fact, when it comes to American-style war across
the Greater Middle East and increasingly much
of Africa, do-over is the name of the game.

In movie terms, you could think of Washington’s war policies in the post-9/11
era as pure “play
it again, Sam.” If this weren’t the grimmest “game”
around, involving
death, destruction, failed states, spreading terror movements, and a region
flooded with the uprooted – refugees, internal exiles, transient terrorists,
and god knows who else – it could instantly be transmuted into a popular
parlor game. We could call it “Do-Over.” The rules would
be easy to grasp, though – fair warning – given the recent record
of American war making, it could be a very long game.

Modest preparation would be involved, since you’d be using actual headlines
from the previous weeks. Given the nature of the Bush administration’s
Global War on Terror (now the Obama administration’s no-name war on terror),
however, this shouldn’t be a daunting proposition. Any cursory reader
of the news, aged 12 to 75, will find it easy to take part. Let me give
you just a handful of examples of how Do-Over would work from a plethora of
recent news stories:

Here, for instance, is a typical, can’t-miss, Do-Over headline:
“Back to Iraq: U.S. Military Contractors Return In Droves.”
For Washington’s third Iraq War, with a military that now heads into
any battle zone hand-in-hand with a set of warrior
corporations, the private contractors are returning to Iraq in significant
numbers. In the good old days, after the invasion of 2003, for every
American soldier in Iraq, there was at least one private contractor.
As RAND’s Molly Dunnigan wrote
back in 2013, “By 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense employed 155,826
private contractors in Iraq – and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization
is unprecedented in modern warfare.” (Afghan War figures were
remarkably similar: in 2010, there were 94,413 contractors and 91,600 American
troops in that country.) Now, in the ongoing war against the Islamic
State (IS) in Iraq, contractors, 70% American, hired by the Pentagon and
other U.S. agencies outnumber the 3,700
U.S. military personnel on the ground by two to one or more and the names
of the companies putting them there should ring a distinctly Do-Over bell
from the previous round of war: KBR,
DynCorp,
and Fluor
Corporation, among others. Of course, since it’s a Do-Over
and we know just what happened the last time around, what could possibly
go wrong?

Here’s another kind of headline
for the game. Think of it as a “new” Do-Over (a story
that looks like a first-timer, but couldn’t be more repetitive): “U.S.
Plans to Put Advisers on Front Lines of Nigeria’s War Against Boko
Haram.” As the New York Times reports, a plan developed
by Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, U.S. Special Operations commander for
Africa, to “send dozens of Special Operations advisers to the front
lines of Nigeria’s fight against the West African militant group Boko
Haram” is expected to be approved by the Pentagon and the White House.
Those special ops forces, “dozens” of them, are slated to advise
Nigerian troops for the first time in the embattled northern part of their
country. Though theirs will not officially be a combat role, they
will be stationed in an area where anything might happen. At first
glance, this may seem like something new under the sun in Washington’s
expanding “war against the Islamic State” (to which Boko Haram
has pledged its fealty), but only until you consider a remarkably similar
October 2015 headline
about a neighboring country: “The U.S. Is Sending 300 Military Personnel
to Cameroon to Help Fight Boko Haram.” Those special ops troops
were to conduct
“airborne intelligence and reconnaissance operations” against
that grim Nigerian terror group. Or to leap back another year, consider
this headline
from May 2014: “U.S. Deploys 80 Troops to Chad to Help Find Kidnapped
Nigerian Schoolgirls.” (They weren’t found.) And
of course, similar headlines could be multiplied across the Greater Middle
East over the last decade against groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
and the Islamic State from Yemen
to, most recently, Iraq
and Syria,
with similarly dismal results.

For your success in finding such a headline, you get a bonus question: Fourteen-plus
years later, after U.S. special ops forces have repeatedly been sent to scads
of countries, and the terror situation has only worsened, what exactly do they
have to teach Nigerians or anyone else for that matter? What is it that
Washington’s guys know about the world of terror and how to fight it that
locals don’t? Given the global record over these years, call that
a mystery of our moment.

Now, here’s an even rarer form of Do-Over, a headline
that calls up not one, but – count ‘em! – two repetitive
themes in the American war on terror: “U.S. Captures ISIS Operative,
Ushering in Tricky Phase.” The story itself is fairly straightforward.
A secretive elite Special Operations team in Iraq has captured “a
significant Islamic State operative,” with more such prisoners expected
in the near future. The captive is presently being held and questioned
“at a temporary detention facility in the city of Erbil in northern
Iraq.” What no one in Washington has yet sorted out is: Where
are such detainees to be kept in the future? It’s a question
that, as you might imagine (and the accompanying New York Times
story makes clear), instantly brings to mind Guantanamo and, in Iraq, Abu
Ghraib (with its nightmarish
photos), and that’s just to begin a longer list of grim places,
including a string of “black
sites,” and military
and CIA
prisons begged, borrowed, or appropriated across the planet in the Bush
years. In all of them, American intelligence and military personnel
(and private contractors) grossly abused,
mistreated, tortured
and in some cases actually killed
prisoners. So in the conundrum of what to do with that single Islamic
State captive lies an almost endless set of Do-Over possibilities.
Lurking in that same headline, however, is another kind of Do-Over of these
last years reflecting another set of repetitive war on terror practices:
“U.S.
drone strike kills a senior Islamic State militant in Syria,”
“U.S.
drone strike kills Yemen al-Qaida leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi,” “U.S.
Commandos Raid Terrorist Hideouts in Libya, Somalia, Capture Senior Al-Qaeda
Official.” In these and so many other headlines like them
lies evidence of a deeply held Washington conviction that terror outfits
can be successfully disabled and in the end dismantled, as can repressive
states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya,
by taking out key leadership figures. This heavily militarized top-down
approach, labeled “the
kingpin strategy,” has been brought to bear time and again in
America’s post-9/11 conflicts. That there is no evidence at
all of its effectiveness (and significant evidence that it actually succeeds
in making such groups more brutal and efficient and such states into failed
ones) seems not to matter. So in any headline about a terror leader
or lieutenant captured in a U.S. special ops raid, there is automatically
a second classic Do-Over theme.

Now, what about a Do-Over round for events that haven’t even happened
and yet are already in reruns? Take this recent headline:
“After Gains Against ISIS, Pentagon Focuses on Mosul.”
We’re talking about a much-predicted U.S.-backed Iraqi (and Kurdish)
offensive against Mosul. Small numbers of Islamic State militants
took Iraq’s second largest city in June 2014 after the American-trained
Iraqi army collapsed
and fled, shedding quantities of American-provided equipment and their uniforms.
The offensive to retake it was being
touted in a somewhat similar manner a year ago by U.S. Central Command.
At that time, 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops were supposedly being prepared
to recapture the city in a spring 2015 offensive that somehow never came
to be (perhaps because those 20,000 or more troops essentially didn’t
then exist). That “pivotal battle” to come was at the
time being promoted by American military officials. As Reuters wrote,
it was “highly unusual for the U.S. military to openly telegraph the
timing of an upcoming offensive, especially to a large group of reporters.”
As it turned out, they tipped those reporters off to nothing.

At the moment, Pentagon officials are touting such an offensive all over again
for spring 2016, or if not quite now, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General
Joseph Dunford put
it recently, at least not in “the deep, deep future.”
(Iraqi military officials, however, already beg
to differ, predicting that such an offensive will be at least many months
away “or longer.” Welcome to the Mosul offensive of 2017!) Of course,
we already have a remarkably clear idea of what Mosul will look like in the
wake of such an offensive, should it ever happen. After all, we know just
how the smaller Iraqi city of Ramadi ended up after a six-month campaign by
U.S.-trained and backed Iraqi troops to retake it from Islamic State militants:
largely depopulated, 80%
destroyed, and a landscape of rubble
thanks to hundreds of U.S. air strikes, street-by-street fighting, and IS booby
traps (with no rebuilding funds available).
In other words, we already have a Do-Over vision of a future Mosul, should 2016
finally be the year when those Iraqi troops (and American advisers and planes)
arrive in the IS-occupied city. (Perhaps the only non-Do-Over possibility
is the grimmest of all – that, as the American Embassy in Baghdad has suddenly
taken to warning,
Mosul’s massive, compromised dam could collapse
as the winter snows melt, essentially sweeping the city away and possibly killing
hundreds of thousands of downstream Iraqis.)

On the positive side, since the American war on terror shows no sign of abating
or succeeding, and as no one in Washington seems ready to consider anything
strategically or tactically but more (or slightly less) of the same, Do-Over
has a potentially glowing future as a war game. After all, based on almost
15 years of experience from Afghanistan to Nigeria, further destruction, chaos,
the growth of failed states, the spread of terror groups, and monumental flows
of refugees seem guaranteed, which means that there should never be a dearth
of Do-Over-style headlines to draw on.

One warning, though: in the annals of such games, this one is unique. Because
of the nature of the American way of war in our time, Do-Over may be the only
game ever invented in which there can be no ultimate winner and, unfortunately,
the tag line “Everyone’s a loser!” doesn’t seem like a selling
way to go. Though the game is still in its planning stages, perhaps the
ending has to be something realistic and yet thrilling like: “You’ve
been Done-In!”

Those kids have grown up, in the temporal sense, and taking over, and its still a game to them.

Carnaptious

Not everyone is a loser in the do over game. War corporations and banks find it very profitable indeed.

SanityClaus

Little Johnny Swastika wants a career. He was born in the U.S.A. but he wants to kill the enemies of the BritishCrown/N.A.T.O.. Johnny doesn’t know what loyalty to the American Revolution of 1776 means. The R.O.T.C. school recruiter at the local high schoolpromised him a career and an adventure.
Johnny completed army basic training over summer vacation. Johnny is still a high school senior.
Treason and murder are taught to high school children here in the U.S.S.A. where our civilian goverment of common law has been abolished by the military.